Episode 22 - Scott Johnson

Struggle to Understand

In this episode, I speak with Scott Johnson, a high school science teacher who lives in Plainfield, Indiana. Scott has been a science educator for nearly 20 years with nearly a decade of that educating advanced and ambitious students in his anatomy and physiology courses. We speak about how he came to the teaching profession, what lessons he has learned from his experience as a classroom teacher – both positive and negative, and then turn to a conversation about how our educational systems often too often do not provide the kinds of outcomes we desire from them. In tandem with this, we discuss his experience of teaching through COVID, the constraints and opportunities the pandemic forced upon him, and how he believes the experience has made him a better teacher – and his students into better students. Given the centrality of public education in our lives today, we often become mired in discussions on how to fix teaching, fix teachers, fix schools, etc. but rarely spend enough time speaking to those who have dedicated their lives to seriously helping others improve their lives through education. As we discuss toward the end of this discussion, public educators have to teach the public and, In this way, they are civil servants engaging with a serious civic duty. Perhaps if we spent more time trying to understand what kinds of citizens we want to live with, and less time with what kind of workers we want to hire or what kind of consumers we want to fill our marketplace, we might be able to better tackle the challenges that come with teaching an increasingly diverse student population. Maybe this will better help us understand the public facet of public education a bit better and may, by extension, improve our collective lives as well.

Introductory music was written by Alex Yoder. Find him here

Please consider supporting the podcast here and following it on Twitter. Thank you for your support!